Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” is a survivor’s account of the terrible tragedy of the Second World War. Weisel’s Night is a narrative filled with pain; it recounts the traumatic childhood of weasel, and the terror of his fight for survival in the new world invented by the Germans. They illustrate something essentially terrible within all of us; the loss of the self. For the two victims of the Nazi’s extermination campaign their humanity was robbed from them as they became the victims of the Nazi ideology of hate. When Weisel entered the camp he was symbolically stripped of his humanity by the removal of his name, “I became A-7713. From then on I had no other name.”1 This first gesture to move him from a person with a name to merely a number was a gesture of inhumanity. For Celan the experience has become almost an absurd footnote, two radically juxtaposed things could take place all at once for example when he says, “jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing.”2 Something once so very human and beautiful becomes a symbol of cruelty and inhumanity. Weisel tells the story of an almost trampled to death Pole violinist. He describes a new reality. The human action that once carried with it so much beauty had now been relegated to pain, and absurdity. The fact that humanity can exist while this goes on makes the thought crueler still. The tortured Celan goes on with, “play death more sweetly Death is a master from Deutschland”, he eludes to how they play with death as it would be a game, death, the greatest universality of humanity is made into a mockery by the Nazis.3 They have opened the door to a new reality. The Nazi world is one where thinks that had once been relegated to the category of nightmare could now be included in the everyday. Ordinary life became terror.
In the Felstiner version of Celan’s “Todesfuge”, we grapple with incoherence as it slowly switches back from German to English. I get the feeling I did from T.S. Elliot’s “The Wasteland” that the world is becoming more and more incoherent. It is an appeal to inter-nationalism to Elliot, but I feel the message Felsteiner conveys with his partial translation of “Todesfuge” may be something more. I think the choice to preserve it in partial German emphasize the culpability. The Nazis have recreated reality, in their world, death is not universality, and “death is a master from Germany”.4 Celan is full of contradictions as his memory unravels the torture and horror. “Black milk of daybreak” can come to mean so much, when Celan declares “we drink it at evening” he is appealing to the incoherence of there reality.5 Milk is essentially a life giving substance, and is something they would never receive in a camp. It would go to the front for the soldat gets. So the fact that it is something they can never have plays a part, and that it is black he states a contradiction this could even be taken to suppose it doesn’t exist, or at least that in the reality that the Nazis have engineered in the concentration camp, black milk is just as likely to exist as milk, because the world is descending into absurdity. As the world loses meaning (or worse falls into the new Nazi reality) the self is swallowed up. How can there in fact be any true self anymore, after Auschwitz.
The strict schedule of inhumanity became a calling card for life in these camps. Weisel recounts a beating that took place one day when he crossed the foreman, “Abruptly, he calmed down and sent me back to work as if nothing had happened. As if we had taken part in a game in which both parts were of equal importance.”6 The fact that actions once reserved for moments of rage were deemed as normal and were now committed as if life and death and all things betwixt were just games in the new world the Nazis had created. For Weisel it all had no meaning anyway reality just became a mass of contradiction, and absurdities, he affirmed himself as nothing, “now but ashes”, but since he was condemned to such misery and suffering his very sacrifice became a chance for radical discord. “But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without god, without men”, the reality of the impossible inhumanity has in Weisel’s mind destroyed the possibility of being human. He has ascended past the need to have a body anchored in reality since what was going on around exceeded reality then he no longer needed to acknowledge reality. His world became hollow, “without love or mercy”, and though he was “nothing but ashes now, he felt himself stronger than this almighty to whom his life had been bound for so long.” The almighty must have been impotent or absent to have abandoned him thus he had come to the conclusion he who survived this was stronger than the absentee or impotent almighty that allowed his chosen people to become ashes. He had freed himself since his body had become nothing, he began to transcend the suffering, but into a dark reality full of torment, and pain. When he realizes something in him has seriously changed the revelation makes him feel, “like a stranger.”7 What everyone was saying no longer seemed true to him he heard the prayer and retorted with his questions, “Blessed be thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to walk as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in furnaces? Praised by thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?”8
Humanity and reality slowly disappeared for these two victims; their minds retreated and grew dark in exile. Celan acknowledges that they will just become smoke, just float away in the sky. Life has obtained a horrible surreal quality while it has become devoid of anything, but torment, “Black Milk”. Weisel is able to retrieve drops of humanity on the way as a few words of encouragement hold him together, and he pushes on, even when his father dies he is able to survive. Another Jew, a Pole gives him enough words to live on.
“Comrades, you are now in the concentration camp Auschwitz. Ahead of you lies a long road paved with suffering. Don’t lose hope. You have already eluded the worst danger: the selection. Therefore, muster your strength and keep you faith. We shall all see the day of liberation. Have faith in life, a thousand times faith. By driving out despair, you will move away from death. Hell does not last forever… And now here is a prayer, or rather a piece of advice: let there be camaraderie among you. We are all brothers and share the same fate. The same smoke hovers over all our heads. Help each other. That is the only way to survive. (…) Those were the first human words.”9
The Pole is able to give Weisel a precipice of humanity to hold onto. The fact that the entire Nazi campaign had sought to take every drop of humanity from him and his co-victims, one Pole, one survivor was able to breathe a few drops of humanity into him, a few pieces of self. Weisel lives always lost in dark thought of the hell his mind has receded in horror to escape; a different kind of terror to have experienced a new reality that forsakes life in every form and only destroys viciously and inhumanely. Celan and Weisel are alive, but the terror remains and no shred of dignity can ever totally repair the total horror of one of mankind’s darkest chapter, and that has come to be the greatest warning of the danger of human indifference in the 20th Century, a legacy we are heirs to in the 21st, and something we must always be vigil for.
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